DistroWatch Weekly

A weekly opinion column and a summary of events from the distribution world

DistroWatch Weekly

DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 340, 8 February 2010

Welcome to this year's 6th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! On the occasion of the forthcoming release of PC-BSD 8.0, a major new update of the desktop-oriented FreeBSD system, DistroWatch talks to Kris Moore, the project's founder and lead developer. What is the relationship between FreeBSD and PC-BSD like? Which are the new features in version 8.0? What are the project's future plans? Read on to find out more. In the news section, we link to an interesting article investigating the history of FreeBSD and also to a guide whose goal is to get newcomers to Linux up and running with the latest release of Fedora. Further down in the news, the first issue of BSD magazine is now available for free download, Canonical's Jane Silber talks about the role of women in the world of open-source development, and Kongoni announces the end of its Slackware-based distribution. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the DistroWatch.com January 2010 donation is Qimo 4 Kids, a charity project that develops a free Ubuntu-based distribution for children. Happy reading!

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Feature Story (by Jesse Smith)

Interview with Kris Moore, PC-BSD

Recently, I had a chance to exchange some e-mails with Kris Moore (pictured on the right), the founder of the PC-BSD project. For those of you interested in the BSD scene, PC-BSD is a desktop operating system which uses FreeBSD as its base. The PC-BSD team has been busy recently, preparing for their 8.0 release. Mr Moore kindly agreed to answer a few questions, which I'll share here with you.

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DW: From what I've read, PC-BSD makes a strong effort to add to the underlying FreeBSD operating system without changing the base. Are there any parts of FreeBSD you do have to change and what effect does this have on the system?

KM: We've actually done a very good job at keeping as vanilla of a FreeBSD base as possible. With PC-BSD 8.0, the only differences are a few extra kernel configuration options, such as "atapicam" support to enable CD/DVD burning and options to enable some specific "pf" firewall features.

DW: Could you please explain the relationship between PC-BSD and iXsystems? Do they own/control the project?

KM: iXsystems owns the trademark "PC-BSD", and greatly assists it by funding some of its development, along with promotion and support. The project itself is open source, of course. All our code is BSD licensed and freely available.

DW: There are lots of reasons I can think of to move from, say, Windows to PC-BSD. Can you provide some reasons why a Linux user, or vanilla FreeBSD user, might want to switch to PC-BSD?

KM: For a Linux user, PC-BSD is one of the best ways to "get your feet wet" with the BSD platform. Many of the tools and desktop options will be similar to what is offered on Linux, such as KDE 4, Firefox, etc. However PC-BSD makes it super simple to get started digging into the FreeBSD platform. You'll be able to spend less time compiling and figuring out how to get your desktop working, and have more time to become immediately productive.

The same ease-of-install applies to a regular FreeBSD user. It can be quite time-consuming to get a graphical desktop set up and configured on plain FreeBSD, and PC-BSD provides a way to bypass that step. Also PC-BSD offers some additional niceties during installation, such as options to set up ZFS, mirroring, disk encryption and other features not present in FreeBSD's installer routine, which often required a bit of manual tweaking to use.

DW: What are some things you're really happy about regarding version 8?

KM: In version 8, we've really gone back to the drawing board on a lot of features. Almost all of our tools have been updated or enhanced in a variety of ways, however the largest new feature is the replacement of our old system installer, with a brand new GUI and separate backend. This new installer supports many new features for disk setup options, the ability to choose between installing PC-BSD or vanilla FreeBSD with a single click, and advanced logging and error reporting to enable us to easily fix installation issues. Also, the DVD doubles as a live disk.

DW: What do you see as the next big challenge for your team? What will you be working on next?

KM: After the release of 8, we've still got plenty to do. I'm hoping to do a lot of general code clean up, re-writing much of our PBI installer to simplify and streamline application installation routines. Also on the list are some new features for our networking GUIs, such as support for easy creation of a WiFi hotspot.

DW: There are three CD ISOs available for download (for PC-BSD 7.1). Is it possible to install PC-BSD off a single CD? Do you have a live CD for demo/testing purposes?

KM: Starting with 8.0, we'll be changing our media up a bit. For installation or live mode, we'll be offering just a DVD or a USB image. We will still offer a CD, but it will be a "boot-only" image, allowing you to install or restore a system from the network or Internet.

DW: How much coordination happens between the FreeBSD team and the PC-BSD team? Do you share code, ideas?

KM: We try to keep in sync as much as possible with the FreeBSD side of things. Any patches we make to improve something in the FreeBSD base system get submitted back to the FreeBSD tree for inclusion. We've also begun to offer some of our tools and utilities in the FreeBSD ports system, such as networking GUIs. We also discuss ideas often, especially at trade shows, where we try to brainstorm various ideas and features which would be beneficial to both communities.

With the main story covering a BSD system, let's start the news section with other BSD stories that made headlines last week. Firstly, here is an interesting article, published by H Open, entitled Health Check: FreeBSD - 'The unknown giant'. It starts with a recap of the project's rather turbulent early days and ends with examining its current status among the free operating systems, including the obligatory comparison with Linux: "Although FreeBSD hasn't had the public impact or profile of Linux it has grown steadily, as "the unknown giant among free operating systems", and is probably as healthy as it has ever been, offering the traditional virtues that are often associated with Linux, such as price/performance, security and stability on commodity platforms running Intel or AMD Processors, or tucked away quietly on widely used networking devices from the likes of Cisco, Juniper, Force10, and NetApp."

On a separate note, the first free online issue of BSD Magazine was published last week. It covers a variety of topics, including a first look at PC-BSD 8.0, installing and securing an Apache jail with SSL on FreeBSD, comparison of OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD as file sharing servers (the first part deals with NFS), IPsec VPNs - an introduction to IKE and IPsec, LDAP on FreeBSD, secure and stable mail servers with OpenBSD and qmail, developing secure storages on FreeBSD, web server benchmarking, an interview with Olivier Cochard-Labbé, the founder of FreeNAS and other topics. The issue is available as a free download (in PDF format), but you need to give away your email address in order to receive the download link.

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Fedora isn't the most beginner-friendly distribution out there, but sometimes a good guide can help to turn even a casual Linux user into a confident expert. Last week, TuxRadar published a newbie's guide to Fedora 12, designed to help anybody to install and use this popular distribution: "Sometimes it's easy to forget that we all had to start somewhere with Linux. When you're not used to the way it works, or the kind of concepts involved, Linux can seem like a foreign language. If you're struggling with free software, or if you know someone who needs help making the switch to Linux, we hope this feature will help. Fedora is a great choice of distribution to start with. It's easy to install and just as easy to use. It's one of the most well-respected distributions available, and has a very tight relationship with its parent and chief sponsor, Red Hat. With Fedora, you have access to one of the largest communities in the world of Linux, and one of the biggest selections of software to play with."

Still on the subject of Fedora, Valent Turkovic has emailed to tell us about a new release of Fedora Community Respin (formerly Fedora Community Remix), a Fedora variant with a variety of user-friendly enhancements: "We would like to announce a live CD/USB release of Fedora Community Respin 12.2. Features: 100% compatible with Fedora; Compiz Fusion compositing window manager; KDE and GNOME desktops; multimedia support out of the box; additional Xfce and Enlightenment desktops; GNOME Do - an intelligent application launcher; OpenOffice.org 3.1; Inkscape, Scribus, GIMP, Blender; Evolution with native Exchange support; Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0; better hardware compatibility for Broadcom wireless cards; educational and astronomy software installed; Google Chromium browser; wireless security tools; GPS and location applications; Nautilus in browser mode by default...." Download the live DVD image from here: Community-Fedora-Remix-12.2.iso (1,782MB, MD5).

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Ubuntu Fridge has published a brief interview with Jane Silber, the recently-appointed Chief Executive Officer at Canonical. In it, she talks about her new position in the Ubuntu community and specifically about the role of women in the male-dominated world of free and open source software: "I joined the Ubuntu Women mailing list around the time it was created. And while I have followed the ups and downs of that group with interest, I haven't taken an active role in the group. I recognise that due to my role at Canonical, my experience in the community as a woman is very different than others, and I thought it was important to provide the space for other women in the community to understand and articulate the issues from their perspective. I recognise the value of sharing experiences and having the support of people in a similar position, and I relied on women's groups early in my career. In particular, when I was working as a software developer and researcher in Japan, I joined the Systers email community (started by Anita Borg, and now part of the Anita Borg Institute). At a time when I felt I was an isolated minority (by gender, exacerbated by culture), the Systers list gave me real support. Knowing that I could find people with similar experiences and even solutions at times, was a real boon for me. I hope that the Ubuntu Women's group can provide similar support within the Ubuntu community."

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Finally, bad news about Kongoni GNU/Linux, an interesting Slackware-based distribution with options to compile packages from source and some nice system configuration and package management tools. A. J. Venter, the distribution's founder and lead developer, announced the project's end last week: "I had enough faith to give it a try and hope to build a community that would create something together which we all could love. Unfortunately, it seems that this is not the way it happened. On virtually every question posted in the forums, I posted the only response. So I was tech support, developer and everything - all for a non-paying hobby project. Unfortunately - that is not a long term viable situation. So, with a lot of sadness and after a very long thinking, I have decided to withdraw from my position as leader of this project. If somebody else wishes to take over, please contact me - and I will do everything in my power to get you set up. Perhaps a new vision and a different leader can attract those coders I couldn't." It's interesting to note that this is the second time A. J. Venter started and discontinued a Linux distribution; the first one was OpenLab GNU/Linux (also based on Slackware). Third time lucky, perhaps?

Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith)

Backups

Better-safe-than-sorry asks: What do you recommend for backups? Methods, scripts, best practices?

DistroWatch answers: There are all sorts of different approaches for backing up data and what works best for you will differ a bit depending on your knowledge and the resources available to you. People who have 1.5 TB of music will want a different approach than the person who has 100 MB of pictures and text documents. Rather than dig into various methods (and there are a lot), I'm going to offer some general tips that I've found to be helpful. Please keep in mind, these are just tips for people at home; while some may also be helpful for businesses, that's a whole different topic.

Whatever method you use to backup your files, make sure it works. This probably sounds obvious, but I've run into situations where people thought they had daily backups of a server and it turned out there wasn't any useful data in the archives. So make sure you can restore data from your backups, otherwise your spare copy is just a paperweight. Pretend to lose a file every so often and see how much effort it takes to get your data back. Test your archives on a regular basis to make sure when an emergency strikes, there won't be any (extra) problems.

Always make more than one backup. Anything important enough to backup is important enough to backup twice. I've been through scary times where my backup has been corrupted and the second (or third) backup came through for me. It's also a good idea to store your backups in separate areas. One in your home for easy access and another which is kept at a different location, like a friend's house. The idea being that if one building burns down, your important files are somewhere else.

Following on the heels of #2, if you're keeping backups in different locations or sending data over a network, you may want to encrypt the files. The GNU Privacy Assistant (GPA) is an excellent tool for file encryption, as is GPG. For users who run a KDE desktop, KGpg and the Dolphin file browser make encryption and decryption point-and-click easy. Also, if your archives are password protected, make sure the password is something you will remember. You may have to use it six months, a year or even six years from now.

Keep it simple. I've seen some really complex, powerful scripts out there that ultimately just copied a file and placed it in a zip archive. Make sure whatever method you use to backup and restore data is as simple as possible. If your home machine's backup system uses a page-long script, pipes, half a dozen command line programs and three passwords (or keys), you're doing it wrong. A good backup solution is simple, portable and easy to debug.

One point to consider is how automated you want your backup process to be. For example, do you want to manually burn your important files to CDs on a regular basis, or do you want your files sent to a remote server via a cron job? And, going back to tip #1, if your process is automated, check up on it regularly to make sure it's really working. I once discovered an important server hadn't completed its backup procedure for three iterations because of a minor change to another machine on the network. That's not a good feeling.

When you start looking at the specific method you want to use, I recommend examining rsync if you're going to copy your data over a network. On the other hand, if you're copying data to a local USB drive, you might want to simply use something like find or tar to create your archive. For people who want to dive deeper into the hows and whys of backups, there's a good article which goes into more detail.

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Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it. (Linus Torvalds)

Andrew Gillis has announced the release of VortexBox 1.1, a Fedora-based distribution that easily converts an unused computer into an audio server or jukebox: "VortexBox 1.1 released. I am very excited about this release of VortexBox. We are moving from being just a media server to a music player as well. This version of VortexBox includes VortexBox Player. You can use your internal sound card or external USB DAC to play your music. VortexBox Player supports music recorded at up to 24-bit / 192 kHz. This is higher then most players support including the Sonos and SqueezeBox line of hardware players. We have also added a lot of other great features requested by the VortexBox, SqueezeBox, and Sonos communities: VortexBox Player as the default software player; covers are added to all MP3 files for easy use in iTunes and XBMC; option to have MP3 or AAC mirror updated after ripping." Here is the full release announcement.

Paul Sherman has announced the release of Absolute Linux 13.0.8, a lightweight, Slackware-based desktop distribution featuring the IceWM window manager and solid multimedia playback support: "Absolute Linux 13.0.8 released. Multimedia installer fix. Only a few packages changed, but the multimedia installer was not properly updated and this could lead to some confusion and lack of functionality for users who chose to install the media enhancements. Kernel bump - version 2.6.32.7 and all January Slackware updates. Lots of updates to synchronize with Slackware -current and some multimedia scripts updated to keep pace with new kernel device nomenclature. It turned out a lot less painful than expected. Brasero (CD burning) is back, DVDStyler added. Aside from kernel, a lot of multimedia capabilities were updated and tweaked." Visit the project's home page to read the brief release announcement.

Toutou Linux is a variant of Puppy Linux designed for French-speaking users. The project's latest version of the fast, lightweight distribution is 4.3.1, released earlier today. Compared to Puppy Linux 4.3.1, the new Toutou comes with a new "golden" desktop theme, the network is set up automatically during boot (for wireless networks one only needs to set any security parameters), and there is a new menu grouping all the assistants and utilities. The distribution now has three separate menus listing programs, services and sessions - all of these are modifiable via a new menu manager. Other changes include user-friendly extensions to context menus, new tool for automatic loading of selected partitions, a tool for launching applications at start-up, and new functionality of the Pmount tool which can now mount partitions in either read-only mode or in read/write mode. There is more, please read the complete release notes (in French) for further details.

eBox Technologies has announced the release of eBox Platform 1.4, an Ubuntu-based server distribution that offers easy and efficient computer network administration for small and medium-size businesses: "eBox Technologies is proud to announce the general availability of eBox Platform 1.4. Besides incorporating a range of new features and improvements, the eBox Platform 1.4 release features SaaS options, such as remote backup and low-cost VoIP calls to mobile phones and land-lines. Two of the most important new features of eBox Platform 1.4 include support for master-slave LDAP servers and Microsoft Windows Active Directory synchronization. Moreover, new features include new webmail module, PPPoE support, Multi-WAN support for DHCP and PPPoE configured gateways, new Samba (3.4.5) version, dynamic DNS updates via DHCP and new RADIUS module." Read the full press release for more details.

Rene Mayrhofer has announced the release of Gibraltar Firewall 3.0, a major new version of the Debian-based firewall distribution: "This is a major new release, updating into kernel 2.6 and Debian 5.0 'Lenny' as base system and splitting the web interface into front-end and back-end parts in preparation of centralized management tools. Full support for IPv6, in both routing, firewall rules, and application level proxies/daemons, including automatic 6to4 and static 6in4 tunnels. Adding globally reachable IPv6 addresses to a local network is now a simple procedure by simply enabling an automatic 6to4 tunnel with almost no manual configuration. Policy routing setup via web interface with support for multiple default-routes in fail-over as well as load-balancing configurations." Read the detailed changelog for a full list of changes and new features.

Clement Lefebvre has announced the release of Linux Mint 8 "KDE" edition: "The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 8 'Helena' KDE Community edition. The KDE Community edition aims to provide a version of Linux Mint which uses the KDE desktop. This edition is based on Kubuntu 9.10, Linux 2.6.31, X.Org 7.4 and it comes with the latest KDE 4.3.4 and Amarok 2.2.1. Featured improvements in this release: OEM installation, possibility to ignore updates, multiple selection in Software Manager. Software Manager's graphical interface is now easier to use and it shows more content. The layout was changed and by putting the screenshots in the corner of the application you can now see more software and more reviews at once. You don't need to manually refresh Software Manager any more. When new data is available you get notified by Update Manager." See the release announcement, release notes and what's new pages for further details.

Alan Baghumian has released a revised build of Parsix GNU/Linux 3.0, a desktop distribution and live CD based on Debian's testing branch: "The second update version of Parsix GNU/Linux 3.0 'Kev' is available for immediate download. This version merges all security, bug-fix and feature updates published in the APT repositories. It also fixes remaining minor bugs such as mounting an NTFS formatted drive in live mode and X.Org configuration error and represents a new experimental USB installer that enables users to run Parsix from USB keys and pen drives. Parsix 'Kev' brings GNOME 2.26.3, a brand new kernel based on Linux 2.6.29.6 with extra patches and drivers, updated installer system that supports separate /home partition, ext4 file system and GRUB 2." Here is the brief release announcement.

We are happy to announce that the recipient of the January 2010 DistroWatch.com donation is Qimo 4 Kids, an Ubuntu-based distribution designed for very young children. It receives US$250.00 in cash.

According to the project's own description, "Qimo is a desktop operating system designed for kids. Based on the open source Ubuntu desktop, Qimo comes pre-installed with educational games for children aged 3 and up. Qimo's interface has been designed to be intuitive and easy to use, providing large icons for all installed games, so that even the youngest users have no trouble selecting the activity they want." The development of Qimo 4 Kids is sponsored by QuinnCo, a computer recycling charity, founded by Michael and Michelle Hall. It is designed to help special-needs and low-income children by giving them fully-functional computer systems. The developers recently announced that work had started on a new version of Qimo 4 Kids.

Launched in 2004, this monthly donations programme is a DistroWatch initiative to support free and open-source software projects and operating systems with cash contributions. Readers are welcome to nominate their favourite project for future donations. Here is the list of the projects that have received a DistroWatch donation since the launch of the programme (figures in US dollars):